Re: potato to woody
On Fri, Mar 02, 2001 at 10:01:57AM +1100, Brendan J Simon wrote:
> tom wrote:
>
> > OK,
> > I got potato to work
> > how do I upgrade to a new branch?
> >
> > change the /etc/apt/sources.list from 'stable' to 'woody' or
> > 'testing'????
>
> I would go testing unless you really really wanted the bleeding edge
> stuff. I imagine debian developers would use unstable but I have just
> upgraded to testing as I would like the latest applications that have
> some notion of stability. ie. 2 weeks in unstable without major
> problems is good enough for me.
>
Here's what I did to retain most of the stability of potato, but have
newer programs.
- Install a minimal potato system. Go ahead and go through dselect
to make it happy. (I like dselect, it's guite handy for showing depen-
dencies.)
- Add packages from unstable using dpkg. IMO, the best way to get the
packages is to use the search on www.debian.org/distrib/packages. It's
a bit tedious, but along the way, you'll see what other packages the
packages you're adding depend on.
This way, I still get security updates, as going to testing or unstable
kills that feature of apt. It can also help isolate and locate
bugs, since most of your system is well tested.
I have added about 100 packages from unstable to my potato laptop and
feel it is quite stable. I even added perl-5.6, X-4.0.2, gcc-2.95.3,
and gimp-1.2, as well as a 2.4.2 kernel. Of course, security.debian.org
won't do anything for the packages I installed from unstable, but that's
what bugtraq and /. and the source's source are for.
I would also like to point out that for the most part, the packages
in unstable are made from the most current stable source for that
package. By stable, I mean the source's author has declared it stable.
Why would the Debian developers even try to make a stable package from
admittedly unstable source? For example, perl-5.6. Long considered stable,
but the trickiness of breaking it into binary packages, and having those
packages work with an easy to use installation system is why perl-5.6
is still in unstable.
On that note, the most likely cause of problems with unstable packages
is a mistake in configuration files, or other things one would have to
take care of manually if you installed the package yourself from source.
After adding all those packages, the only bug I found was that debconf
didn't set X4.0.2 up right. I still can't get it to create a XF86Config
file. I just had to set it up manually.
<jakemsr@clipper.net>
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